


Silence in Ikebukuro

by dis17



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Domestic, M/M, Slightly Philosophical, i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:40:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5359727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dis17/pseuds/dis17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shizuo is pestered by the flea as he tries to get his job done. What happens when the two most dangerous men in Ikebukuro have to put up with each other for the sake of one little girl?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence in Ikebukuro

**Author's Note:**

> I've been rewriting this fanfic since I was a cringy twelve-year-old. Allow me to attempt to redeem myself by posting the most updated version of it.
> 
> Originally uploaded as "A Walk In The Park."

Ikebukuro seemed silent. The bustling city was alive with the fast footsteps of comers and goers keeping to their own business. The headless rider drove by a couple of times, but all remained oddly quiet and tranquil. Something was missing from this scene amidst the fading light of the setting sun. There were no taunts, no thunderous roars of anger.

 

A dyed blond head of hair hovered above the crowd’s average height, bringing the dark eyes of information broker and local god, Izaya Orihara, to attention.

Shizuo smelled his scent in the air miles away, and gently clenched his hand over a contrasting smaller and daintier one, bringing little Aki to a slightly hastier pace. “Come on now, Aki. Let’s hurry up a little, yeah?”

“But mister, I’m really tiny! I can’t keep up!” the girl complained, and Shizuo groaned. He was debating whether or not to haul her over his shoulder and make the quickest escape he could muster without exposing her to the traumatizing wreckage a fight with the flea would turn into when he heard _that_  voice and winced instinctively.

“Shizu-chan, I didn’t know you had such a little cutie pie with you today!” the flea said in that god awful baby talk, with muddled t’s and muted sounds, as he kneeled over Aki in the middle of the sidewalk.

Shizuo groaned again. “Get  _away_ from her.”

“But, Shizu-chan, I’m not doing anything wrong!” he looked up in mock disappointment. “Just getting to know this lovely young lady here,” he directed to Aki, who was all smiles and giggles.

Shizuo was getting exasperated already. The flea’s lack of care for the impending doom their proximity would cause was one thing, but the fact that he was also taking up time Shizuo could’ve been using to get this innocent child away from himself was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He wanted Izaya to leave  _right now._ He wanted him to leave so much he really might have just felt a twinge of satisfaction imagining himself quite literally throwing Izaya into the next known landmass. He had tried really hard, but he assumed the universe had tried doubly so if Izaya had come for him on this particular day. He was supposed to keep Aki safe, and as much as he hated himself for it, oftentimes “safe” meant “away from Shizuo.”

“What are you doing here with her, Shizu-chan?” said the information broker, snapping Shizuo from his homicidal reverie and bringing a brand new wave of defensiveness and hostility from deep within him.

“None of your damn business,” he replied as sternly as he could. Then to Aki, “We have to go now, okay? Gotta get you somewhere safe.” Aki nodded, eager to be well behaved for the tall mister, who seemed really shy around this _other_ mister dressed in all black. She wondered if the tall mister would mind if she called him by dressed-in-black mister’s nickname for him, so she tried it. “Okay, Shizu-chan!” she beamed up at him.

Shizuo looked at her for a second, processing her tiny face and her smile, and the fact that she was a child. He looked to the flea.

“You see what you fucking do?! Leave!”

“It isn’t my fault I have good taste in nicknames,” he laughed, as if this was amusing to him. “Besides,  _she_ seems to like me, right, Aki?” Aki nodded eagerly, looking at Shizuo as if looking for permission. He, in return, stared her down dumbly, feeling like he just got himself in enormous trouble. He looked between the flea and the kid, and dropped his head with a huff.

“Where do you want to go, Aki?”

 

“Ice cream!” shouted little Aki, skipping over to the bench they had picked out and biting into her chocolaty scoop head on.

“Brain freeze!” she shouted again, after a few moments of stunned, cold cringing.

“Don’t you want some ice cream too, Shizu-chan?” she asked after a while.

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Shizu-chan. You know you want some,” chimed in Izaya, unnecessarily, arching his brows in mock suggestiveness.

Shizuo scowled and replied with a forceful “ _no, thank you_ ” gritted out from between his teeth. “And stop calling me that.”

“Does Shizu-chan not like his name?” Aki asked. She looked genuinely confused, and Shizuo felt a very weary feeling settle down onto him when he realized how much emotional energy he’d been spending on this child, even if only for a day.

“It’s not that I don't like it, I just don’t like annoying people calling me anything.” He side-eyed Izaya in a way that’s just the right amount of obvious, and Aki broke into a fit of giggles that lasted quite a while.

“Wait,” she said. “Izaya said you wanted ice cream. Is that true?”

Shizuo looked down at her and her apparent and very real concern over his ice cream eating habits.

“Yeah, I guess I want some after all,” he said with a huff and got up. He paid for his scoop of vanilla and sat down on their bench, only to basically eat the entire cone in two bites. Aki’s eyes were blown wide in amazement, and Shizuo felt embarrassed despite himself. Izaya’s laughing fits were only interrupted by his snorts once he began, the tense silence of Aki’s surprise and Shizuo’s shame fueling him until tears streamed out of the corners of his eyes.

 

Shizuo watched Aki skip next to the flea in front of him. Night was coming down and he didn’t really know where they were walking, but as long as he didn’t end up at the meeting spot quite yet, he didn’t mind. He had texted Tom about his delay, and had been assured they would be fine. He  _was_ a bit angry that Aki could apparently keep up so easily with Izaya and not him, though, especially since the information broker was mostly, and infuriatingly, faster than Shizuo himself. He didn’t deny that Aki had become attached to him, though. She was much more comfortable talking to him, but Shizuo could understand that; he didn’t think he would feel inclined to talk to an angry, quiet, delinquent-looking, blond giant as a child either.

His thoughts had become less defensive as the evening waned into a darker blue, but now that he had remembered, he was more conscious of the way the flea held Aki’s hand or lifted her off the ground here and there. Shizuo didn’t think Izaya would actually  _hurt_ her, not physically, at least. But he couldn’t help but feel as though he had been tricked. The entire time he had spent with him had passed by in a blur of smiles and eyes scrunched up from laughing too hard. Shizuo couldn’t help but feel that there was a catch, that there was something Izaya had to gain from doing all that. Shizuo was dumb, he knew that, but he also knew that the flea would rather be caught dead than willingly hanging out and eating ice cream next to his arch nemesis unless it was all part of some nefarious plans.

He guessed he shouldn’t have let himself get involved in this, but it had seemed like a good alternative to fighting him off and potentially putting Aki in the middle of it all. He supposed if anything went wrong now, it would be his own fault. He would still try to protect Aki, of course: he wasn’t good at strategies or planning beforehand, but Shizuo knew a hell of a lot about grabbing people and putting them away from wherever he got angry.

Aki sneezed suddenly, and his train of thought was broken. She was shivering and hugging herself, having stopped on the sidewalk. Not many people were passing by at that hour, and Shizuo supposed it  _was_ quite cold.

Hesitating for a second, he tugged on Izaya’s coat. After a few wide-eyed glares from the information broker, Shizuo successfully pulled the thing off him and wrapped it around Aki, who had sneezed a total of seven times during the entire process. They continued walking.

 

Shizuo sighed and admitted defeat for the second time that day.

Aki complained that her feet hurt, and they were stranded on the sidewalk of a main street in town with no clear or unclear destination. Shizuo couldn’t put the meetup off any longer. Street lights were coming on, and the nightlife was finally stirring into something awake and vital, complete with pulsing neon lights in the distance and the echo of loud laughs reverberating down the streets.

He hated the notion of it, but Shizuo was going to have to talk to the flea. He would have to be concise and clear, and a little bit threatening. He would have to look stern and reasonable at the same time. And he would have to behave humanely toward this insect who berated him for doing the exact opposite. Shizuo would never hear the end of it. The monster of Ikebukuro, Shizuo Heiwajima, tamed and domesticated by that shady information broker who probably made that girl on the news fall off that building a few weeks ago.

“Izaya.”

“Yeah?” he answered casually, so casually, like Shizuo’s cranium wasn’t trying to split itself into two from all the stress and anger and confusion caught up in it.

“I’m… gonna need you to go now.”

There was no answer, just a set of beady black eyes staring blankly back at him.

“I, uh… I need to take Aki somewhere… for work. It’s supposed to be confidential.”

“And? Since when do you know big words like ‘confidential’ anyway, Shizu-chan?” Shizuo knew what he was doing… he thought. Izaya was trying to prove that Shizuo couldn’t be civilized and speak to him properly by making him snap, wasn’t he? He would have been insulted if he he hadn’t been so fed up with waiting around for him to leave.

“Look, Aki’s clearly tired, and I can’t drop her off unless I’m alone.”

Izaya looked him up and down for more than a few seconds. His eyes were trained on every movement Shizuo made, likely trying to find some kind of tell that he was an imposter or being mind controlled or something equally as preposterous.

“Alright, but you have to give me my coat back. Meet me tomorrow to get some ice cream, okay, Shizu-chan? Same place and time as today.”

And so he sprinted off somewhere else. His words had been cold and unfeeling, and even while he uttered Shizuo’s hated nickname, his voice didn’t ring of malice or mockery. Shizuo had never had an easy time reading him, but he was entirely lost as to what _that_  had meant.

Aki looked tired.

 

Shizuo took a look around to see if Izaya was following him every time he turned a corner, because he was paranoid like that. Aki was sleeping, her arms thrown over Shizuo’s shoulder as he carried over to the meetup point.

He was received well, by some of Tom’s close acquaintances too. The girl was immediately handed off to a couple who, while keeping her sleep undisturbed, immediately began to fuss over her and cry, presumably of happiness. Shizuo was thanked profusely by Aki’s parents, and had already made to head off for his home when the mother, her face tear-stricken and sad and happy, held out the flea’s girly coat to him. Shizuo briefly thanked her and walked away with it before he had to witness any more emotional exchanges. He had had way more than enough of that during the day.

 

Shizuo definitely did not hold the coat close to him on his walk back home, or up to his face to smell the scent of the damn insect again, or around himself to imagine how warm it would be had it just come off its owner’s body. That would’ve been silly, and not at all something Shizuo would have done after his provincial mind discovered the fact that Izaya Orihara, information broker and local god, was actually a human who could laugh and smile and eat ice cream without having it melt all over himself.

 

The flea was waiting for him when he got there. He wasn’t holding any ice cream, so Shizuo, under a short circuit of his brain, went on to buy him one before sitting down on their bench next to him. He bought one for himself too, but, not wanting to experience another embarrassment, just held it dumbly on one hand as he offered the other to Izaya.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the pink cone of ice cream as if amazed by Shizuo’s cognitive ability to remember he had gotten strawberry the day before.

Shizuo handed him his coat next, feeling dumb for repeating his own movements but not knowing how exactly he could make this conversation less awkward.

“So,” the flea began. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

“About _me?_ ” Shizuo asked, his brow creasing in momentary worry. “What _about_ me?”

“Well, this is a little awkward to admit, but… I may have been wrong about you.” Shizuo was confused.

“I know you can’t be that smart, since you’re a protozoan, but try to keep up, alright Shizu-chan?” Shizuo grumbled in response but kept quiet, hoping that this epiphany Izaya seemed to have had was not, in fact, another ploy to insult Shizuo and make him uproot and destroy the quaint little bench they were on.

“I have quite the god complex, see? I see the people around me and I can’t help but feel I’m better. It’s true; they walk around aimlessly, doing nothing in the entirety of their lifetime, hurting those they love for the sole and ironic purpose of avoiding inflicting harm, whereas I am aware of these horrid behaviours and delusions, and no longer stoop far down enough to feel compelled to act senselessly based on things like emotions. Humans are gross, so I could never be one of them.

“You have always been a different story. You and your brute force are inhuman both physically and mentally. Every single time I’ve wronged you, told you you were a beast or a monster, you got back up and tried to smash my skull in again. Pft. You’re so stupid! You’re so stupid that after having me tell you how horrible you are, you keep doing the exact same shit that makes you such a monster. That’s why I consider you an enemy and not a nuisance, you know? It’s quite the accomplishment.

“But I’ve been rethinking that since yesterday. I mean, you’re clearly able to talk and be civil, if I’m to believe my senses about what happened last night. You very clearly made the decision to avoid being destructive and hold a conversation instead, which is a lot more than what I would expect from a protozoan like you. So that means that your adamant refusal to change your ways isn’t due to an inability to understand what I’m saying, but a personal choice. You  _choose_ to be destructive. You  _choose_ to be incoherent and furious whenever we engage. You  _choose_ to be controlled by your emotions, and you  _choose_ to continue to be yourself despite all the negative feedback I’m giving you. It’s become apparent to me that you seem to believe that being your monstrous self is more important than conforming to what I believe is better. And I don’t know how to feel about that. I don’t know if that makes you more of a human or more of a monster.

“Anyway, I’m not expecting you to understand any of this; I can see you got close to none of it. I just… I guess I wanted to talk about it.” Izaya sighed and licked at his ice cream, which had still not melted into his hand, miraculously. He was slightly flushed and intently staring at the ground instead of Shizuo’s confused face, and Shizuo actually, for once noticed.

He made up his mind to leave and got up, perturbed by the idea of facing the consequences of his future statement were he to stay. Izaya did not look up at him.

“It’s fine, you know, that you think that. I don’t… I don’t really mind being a monster.”


End file.
